The Sixth Stage of Grieving
by TaraFarrago2
Summary: "The five stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or goes in a prescribed order."


Chapter One: Anger

The incongruous sounds of coffee brewing woke him from a deep but not restful slumber, reminding him that when he opened his eyes he would find himself in irregular surroundings – he and Sherlock always used instant.

A dull glow was behind the curtains. Must still be early. Or maybe it was just rainy again. Maybe it was both. He wasn't particularly interested in finding out. He even thought about closing his eyes and waiting for the day to pass, but he knew it wouldn't help. He'd tried it before.

His limbs ached like he'd been running a marathon. Actually, he'd spent the past few days hardly moving at all. He needed exercise. He told himself this, again and again.

John lay where he was on Harry's couch, his gaze drifting listlessly about her sitting room. He was accustomed to this room and, unfortunately, to this vantage point of it. Harriet had lived here for close to a decade, and in the years before and after Clara, John had been obliged to spend many a night on this couch, helping his elder sister out of her relapses. His eyes lighted on the cabinet under the television. Her liquor cabinet. It was empty for the moment – he had checked it his first night, more from force of habit than actual suspicions. He supposed he shouldn't have. She'd been sober for months now, and it was an ungracious gesture, given the bizarre favor she was granting him.

He'd told her that he needed to escape from all the attention, but that had been a pretty ridiculous lie. There were no reporters or fans banging down the door of 221B. Yes, initially there had been inquiries – two journalists, sent away by Mrs. Hudson, and a few visits from Lestrade. Sherlock had asked him to confirm his supposed deception to everyone that he could. Instead he'd seriously considered issuing a statement of his friend's innocence. He'd compromised by speaking to no one.

No, it was more that, after the first day, the silence of the flat had become an assault on his senses. John had felt like he was living in a vacuum – everywhere he looked, Sherlock was missing. He tried to watch telly, but Sherlock wasn't yelling at it. He tried to fix tea in the kitchen, but Sherlock wasn't in the way with his chemistry set. He tried to browse the web, and Sherlock hadn't borrowed his laptop.

Harriet's was the very last place he had wanted to take refuge. But Sherlock had been his only friend – he had nowhere else to turn. What was he supposed to do, crash at Stamford's? No, for better or worse, Harriet was family. And besides, she owed him a lifetime of favors.

The coffee pot was on a timer. John rolled away from the windows and listened to the steam bubbling through the plastic machine, trying to remember what day of the week it was. If it was a weekday, Harry would be down in a few minutes, fix her thermos and head out. John could probably fake being asleep and avoid her till she returned for dinner. He hoped it was a weekday. He could have checked his phone, of course – it was within reach. Somehow it was more satisfying to let his preemptive irritation percolate as he waited to hear her moving around upstairs.

The worst part of the arrangement was that Harry hadn't even liked Sherlock. She'd been very open on that point. They'd met all of once, and Sherlock had been in one of his "too bored to stand it" moods. Even if he hadn't been outwardly rude to her (and he'd been _very_ rude, though of course, as always, everything he'd said had been true) Harry seemed to feel she had a special right to dislike Sherlock on John's behalf.

During her periods of sobriety, Harry's worst fault was being a terrible busy-body, and she'd decided it was her responsibility as John's big sister to see him happily settled, or something like that. She'd blamed Sherlock for John's "revolving door of girlfriends," asserting that Sherlock intentionally sabotaged his relationships to keep him around more often. It was Sherlock's fault, too, that he couldn't land a steady job and get back into medical practice. Everything wrong in John's life – not that _he_ felt _anything_ was wrong – was laid at Sherlock's feet. She'd even accused John once of developing habits of codependency.

She had a fundamental misunderstanding of their relationship, was the problem. They weren't codependent and they weren't a couple and they didn't love each other. John couldn't have put it into words. He didn't know, and he didn't want to know, and it didn't matter anymore, anyway. And Harriet should never have stuck her nose in to begin with.

To be fair, she had so far been perfectly sympathetic and accommodating. Hadn't uttered a bad word about him since the incident. Nothing but condolences and "whatever you need"s. It didn't matter – he knew that she was secretly glad that Sherlock was gone. He could sense it in her silences and her sideways glances, in all her false empathy. It was horrible. If he'd had the money, he would have gone to a hotel.

He'd considered giving up and going back to Baker Street – but even the brief thought of it… He imagined himself alone in the sitting room with the bullet-faced smiley staring down at him, and it was enough to send him off. He could feel his chest tightening, the uncomfortable lump climbing back to its place in his throat. John locked his jaw and buried the side of his face in his pillow. He refused to be held captive to his grief like that.

If only Sherlock hadn't walked off that fucking roof.

There were sounds of movement upstairs. Creaking floorboards, a rushing of the bathroom tap through the walls. The thought that she would very soon come down the stairs rankled him. She had to resent his presence here, invading her space to mourn a man she'd hated – he'd felt the same resentment every time he had to come over and empty her bottles down the drain. She was probably just waiting to lecture him. About how he was better off now. About how he ought to think about getting his life back on track. – He didn't even know what that would mean. Without Sherlock, what would he have to do with himself? Medical practice would seem dull. Maybe the army would take him back…

John allowed himself a brief explosion, violently punching the sofa cushion. He shouldn't have to be considering this! There was _no reason_ for Sherlock to have committed suicide. Sherlock _wasn't_ a fraud, Moriarty _was_ real, and now John's life was in shambles for all of it.

Harriet's footsteps on the landing signaled him to shut his eyes and relax, hopefully to appear peacefully asleep again. She padded softly past him to the kitchen, pausing only briefly at the couch to look over him. He lay as still as he could. He didn't want to talk to her – didn't want to see her – didn't want to have to think about how wrong she had been about Sherlock for all those months and how the stories in the papers only seemed to prove her right.

To no avail, however. As Harriet set to work on her coffee, she called quietly over her shoulder, "I know you're awake."

With an audible sigh and a private grimace, John rolled onto his back. "How could you tell?" he asked, trying to sound pleasantly conversational.

"You were grinding your teeth," she told him.

John pursed his lips and sat up, looking over his shoulder to find her smiling at him kindly from the kitchen. "Coffee?" she offered.

"Sure," he said, forcing a yawn.

"Did you sleep at all?"

Small talk, then. Just had to get through a few minutes of idle chatter and she'd be off to the office. He rose to join her, perching himself on one of the stools at the counter. "Yeah. Yes, the couch is… really comfortable. Thanks."

Harriet slid him a mug and the creamer, tucking a lock of coarse blonde hair behind her ear as she reached for the sugar. "You really don't have to keep thanking me," she told him. "I know how much I owe you."

John wondered if she did.

"Listen," she went on, "why don't you come join me for lunch on my break today?"

He shook his head, not at all comfortable with the idea. Out in a public place?... He wasn't concerned about being recognized. Sherlock was only slightly famous and John was much, much less so. It was more that he still couldn't control where his thoughts meandered to (though he'd certainly been developing the skill over the past week). What if in the middle of ordering a sandwich his found himself recollecting some innocuous thing, like the way Sherlock would pick at the food on the edges of John's plate when they were between cases, and then have an episode right there in the restaurant?

And then there was that he'd have to sit across from Harriet and make more small talk for close on an hour. What would they talk about? How his day was going? All the crap telly he'd seen recently? Maybe she'd like to take the opportunity to discuss his future plans, or try to commiserate with him about having a partner or friend who had lied to you, even though _his_ friend _hadn't_ lied…

"I don't know," he said. If he told her no outright, he would be obliged to offer an explanation.

She pressed on, her voice full of casual concern, "You just haven't been outside for a few days. Don't you think that's a bit unhealthy?"

John bristled. He was a doctor, he knew what was healthy and what wasn't – like, for instance, draining a bottle of Gordon's in a single afternoon. "I think a little stale air never killed anyone," he said, strategically aiming for light banter. "Besides, London air's not exactly fresh, is it?"

"Still," she said, sounding disappointed and uneasy. He looked up and could see in the lines around her eyes – remarkably like how their mother's used to look – that she was preparing for a difficult trek up to the moral high ground. He set his jaw and readied himself for the forthcoming lecture. "John, I… I've been thinking," she began. "Maybe you'd like to see that therapist again. The one who was helping you before –"

"She wasn't," he snapped. It certainly wasn't what he'd expected her to say, but that didn't make it any more welcome. "Helping me, I mean. She wasn't… it wasn't her that helped me." _Fire her_, Mycroft had advised him, _she's got it the wrong way around._ John wanted to slam his hand down on the counter and make Harriet understand that it was Sherlock who had helped him – _helped_ him, not sabotaged him or ruined him. Instead, he concentrated on holding his coffee mug.

"Okay," Harry said complacently. "Well, maybe she could help you this time. Or maybe someone else, then." John kept his jaw set, unable to meet her gaze or to respond. After a moment's hesitation, his sister's hand reached over to light on his own. "I know it's hard –"

"Don't," he warned her, leaning back and taking his hand with him. There was no way Harriet could understand what he was feeling – how could she, when even _he_ didn't understand? She'd had an ugly divorce from a woman who'd enabled her addiction for five years and then cheated on her, but horrible as that may have been, it bore no resemblance… it wasn't even _close_ to what John was going through. She could complain to her friends and go to support groups and everyone would get it without her having to explain. John had no friends (no _real_ friends, anyway, not like Sherlock) and thanks to Sherlock and Moriarty and everyone else the world thought that his best friend had been a monster – a poisoner of children and a first-class fraud – and how stupid must he have been to have not seen it, or to have seen it and stayed with him anyway? How could he explain that, no, they weren't a couple, and no, they weren't really just friends, and no, Sherlock wasn't what the papers and the police claimed, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

So there was no way that he was going to sit here and listen to her tell him how she'd been through it herself when she hadn't. No one had. His jaw was clamped so hard that his teeth hurt. He thought to himself how he shouldn't have to be having this conversation. He shouldn't be here squatting in Harriet's flat, and Sherlock shouldn't have walked off that fucking ledge, because if he hadn't, they would be back home arguing about the appropriate place to store bits of corpses, or flying across London on the trail of some criminal. Where they belonged.

It would be easier to wish they'd never met, but he didn't even have that luxury – John was all too aware that, without a doubt, his life would have been a waste if they hadn't known each other.

Harriet backed off. "Okay. Well, look. Just… give it some thought, okay? There's no rush or anything. I'm just worried about you, Johnny." She avoided looking at him by gathering up her thermos and purse. "I know it takes time, just… whatever you need, it's fine."

"Thanks," he managed, making an effort not to sound sullen.

She headed for the door. He stood and followed her a few steps to be polite. "Text me about lunch, if you decide you're up for it. Or else, I'll see you tonight."

"Sure."

She stopped with her hand on the knob to comment, "It's getting a bit ripe in here. If you don't want to come out, would you mind opening the windows for a bit? I usually leave them cracked during the day, so…"

"Yeah. Sure."

"All right. Well." She pressed her lips together again in a sympathetic smile. "See you."

He stood in the middle of the room for some time after she'd gone, too wound to retreat to the sofa again. He stood there, rigid, silently cursing Sherlock for not being here to pick up the pieces of John's life, cursing Moriarty for leading Sherlock on that maniacal game, cursing Mycroft for handing Moriarty all he'd needed to bring Sherlock down, cursing that bitch of a reporter for her greedy incompetence… Cursing his sister for her inconsistency – for her alcoholism, and for her dislike of Sherlock, and now for her unselfish kindness and support. And he cursed himself, as well, for being so lost, for not being able to articulate what he was mourning and what was missing from his life, for not bothering to comprehend everything he'd had while he'd had it…

Finally, all of his resentments crashed into an overwhelming wave of exhaustion. He started for the sofa again, wending his way through the sitting room, wondering if maybe his sister was right. Perhaps it would be best if he went back to his therapist Ella. Maybe it would do him some good.

He lowered himself onto the cushions, but then rose again, crossed to the window and lifted it open a few inches. The air was a bit ripe in here, after all. And it was raining again, he saw.

John lay down on the couch, tucking his arm under the pillow and moving his phone so it was out of sight. There wasn't anyone who'd be calling him now that he wanted to hear from. Harry would probably be in touch again later to ask about lunch. But no, he wasn't ready for that. He picked up the remote and flipped on the television. If he was lucky, he'd be asleep again when she rang.


End file.
